Punctuation marks

[Jacob]

What's your favourite punctuation mark, and why?

[hal]

sad,sad,sad.

[Moog]

Is an ampersand a punctuation mark? If so then that's my fave

[Jacob]

Oh Abigail, with every answer you give oi think oi get to loike you even more!

[Squirrel]

Mine is more of a pair of punctuation marks:

; -

I have been reliably informed that there is simply no sentence in existence into which this punctuation can be acceptably shoved. I still cling fondly onto it, though.

[gazzawazza]

I like to have a slash every now and then...

[Quizmonster]

Squirrel, People often claim that 'antidisestablishmentarianism' is the longest normal word in English, though there are longer scientific/medical words just made up from strings of the appropriate jargon. The word is, however, the longest one that anyone is at all likely to come across in print during a 'normal' lifetime. But...why couldn't there be an adverb 'antidisestablishmentarianistically' to describe how believers in antidisestablishmentarianism actually behaved?

"What has this got to do with my semi-colon/dash?" you might well ask. Consider this sentence, which might have come from a book on English punctuation written for foreign students...

"The following: . , ... ; - : ? ! are the main pause-markers." There you have your ; - structure, but the elements are separated by a space and it is not acting as punctuation. Another sentence in the same book might read:

"The mark :, known as the 'colon', is used to separate balanced sentence-parts; -, known as the 'dash', is used to introduce sentence-parts in parenthesis." There, you have a semi-colon, a dash and a comma in sequence! Note, though, that there are spaces between them...they are not 'unified'. The semi-colon is used to end the first section of the sentence, the dash is used - not as punctuation - but simply to show the students what a dash looks like and the comma is used to introduce the further parenthetic phrase beginning "known as..."

What I'm saying here is that just about anything re language can be artificially created, in much the same way as I created 'antidisestablishmentarianistically'. The fact is, though, that "you just ain't never gonna see none of them things in reality, man!" Cheers

[arabella]

the interrabang (?!) because it has such a great name.

[Quizmonster]

The interrobang is, indeed, a wonderful name, Arabella. The problem is, though, that it isn't ? ! in sequence, it's ! superimposed on ?...creating a single punctuation mark. It was 'invented' in the early 1960s and hasn't really caught on during 40 years, so it probably never will now. The other problem is, of course, that one is unable - on a normal computer - to print it as required! I daresay one could download it from somewhere, but why bother? Still...I love your answer.

[mikewith]

If this works, it's an interrobang: ¿ . Otherwise I like the sound of the masculine ordinal indicator: º

[mikewith]

(Rats... it didn't work).

[arabella]

really? i thought it was just ?!...ok then!

[Quizmonster]

Click http://www.interrobang-mks.com/ for a web-page that illustrates beautifully what it looks like, Arabella.

[arabella]

wow!! lol thnq quizmonster